Daily CAFE for Long Term Sub

Our first snow day of the year!  I totally needed this!  We (teachers and students) have been working hard and are ready for this unanticipated break!  What to do?  Catch up on some school work, long term planning, play with the pups, and blogging.

Ok, this is my first year implementing Daily 5 and CAFE.  Now that I will be out on maternity leave for a about a month and a half after spring break, I want to make sure students don't have to learn a whole new routine.

You can read about how I originally set up Daily CAFE in my room here.  I had some reservations about doing ALL 5 rounds each day, but got some much better ideas after attending the 3-day conference.  Then I tweaked some things to make it fit for me AND be able to incorporate our district's reading curriculum so I wasn't tossing everything out the window and starting from scratch.  My post Daily CAFE conference reflection and changes I made can be found on this post.

So this is what I have been doing pretty consistently and it's been working out well.

My BIGGEST concern with Daily CAFE was the lack of direct writing instruction & practice with what is specifically taught.  However, I was able to fit it in for 45 minutes after lunch for at least 3 days/week.

For the Tuesday through Thursday rounds before lunch, these are the slides I made for the SmartBoard for each week's story.  Students enjoy the choice, yet it's still in control because it limits them to what I want them to get done but allows for some freedom if they complete any required tasks.  The breakdown of what each part means is below.

This is a sample of the Treasures unit and how I incorporated it into the Daily CAFE rounds.  The writing options in this chart are not necessarily tied in with my direct instruction lessons.  These options are ways they can just write.  

I needed to make sure my long term knew how to run these centers, so I wanted to create a "key" that detailed what each part of the slide meant.  Now I will have it for future sub use!

So, in order to long term plan for reading, I had to know where I would start and then plug in the unit and dates.  That way, I could plan forward and not have to wait to see where I would be leaving off.  You can read about my long term planning thought process here.  So once I knew what unit the sub would be on each week, I put together materials, any homework, tests, etc. and printed them out. I also pre-made the SmartBoard slides so they were ready to go with comprehension skill for the week and the work students would be doing.

I pre-printed pictures of the slides for the rest of the reading units my long term sub would be doing.  This allowed me to write in the dates for each unit and any notes I had about them, if any.

This is the reading tub I put together for my long term sub.  The front contains answer keys and the weekly breakdown of slides as in the picture above.

The file folders contain all the materials for each week's reading unit clipped together with a labeled binder clip (including spelling HW, teaching pages for Monday, weekly assessments for Friday's test, etc.  The teacher edition book is also in the proper folder for each unit.

Disclaimer: I know it looks like a lot of paper.  However, I wanted my long term sub to have a resource if needed.  For instance, I plan to talk to her about some strategies she could use to teach vocabulary in a more fun way instead of using the worksheet provided.  However, it's always good to have something in place.  I also try to plan activities so that paper would not need to be printed unless it's something that will be collected for a grade or accountability purposes.

Now that reading is planned for the time I'm gone (but not necessarily when I'm here the next month), I can move on to plan a different subject!